Today's war is another example. "We are here in many ways because the Iranians have been chanting 'Death to America' for 47 years. I used to say, 'I don't think this is helpful.' " Western interlocutors and intermediaries would respond that the regime didn't really mean it. "Well, if they don't mean it, then don't say it. Stop. But they never would," he says. "To be honest, I think they got away with things for so long that they got used to it."

They didn't count on a president who would break from standard operating procedure, whom they couldn't stall until the next U.S. election. Mr. Ansari says Iran had every chance to avert war. But it lost Europe by siding with Russia in Ukraine, and it refused to make a plausible offer when Mr. Trump returned to office. "The longer they waited, the worse it got. They could've gotten a deal six months ago. But when ships are waiting outside, the asking price goes up." The regime insisted throughout on a "right to enrich uranium"-which "would have more credibility if they respected any other rights as well," Mr. Ansari cracks. "We often think of the Iranians as very strategic thinkers, playing the long game. No, no. It's different. They're ditherers," he says. "We ascribe to them too much competence. I do not consider what's happening now to be the result of great strategic thinking." He points to a "dogmatic ideology and a grievance culture, whereby they've taken a hit for their nuclear program and can't back down." In his assessment, by sheer stubbornness, the regime "basically decided to declare war on the U.S." l The failure to see that, and so much else, can be attributed to the prevailing "Washington-centered analysis," Mr. Ansari says. "We always see Iran as almost marginal to the problem, which is Washington." If only Mr. Trump hadn't done this or that, the commentators rage. But if there is now an opening for regime change, it is because U.S. policymakers for once were able to turn from the mirror and see what the Iranian people know well: The problem is in Iran.

Is Iran on the brink of another revolution?
The regime faces a crisis like never before, historian Ali M. Ansari explains, and the nation has an 120-year tradition of fighting to establish the rule of law. archive.ph/pDQfL By Elliot Kaufman #HistoricalPoliticalMemory #Islamism #IranWar

The museum stopped admitting visitors in November 2024, citing unspecified "fire safety violations." Its website was replaced by a brief statement from the Culture Department of the city government announcing the change. President Vladimir V. Putin has attempted to justify the invasion of Ukraine by falsely characterizing the government in Kyiv as a continuation of the Nazi threat to Russia. While there is no doubt that citizens of the Soviet Union suffered atrocities at the hands of the Nazis, the Kremlin has long sought to downplay crimes the Soviet Union committed against its own people. "Any reminder of the crimes of the Russian state is very inconvenient for the current authorities," said Nikita Sokolov, a historian and editor now living in Germany. "A victorious people can only have a victorious history - there should be no dark pages in it." The Gulag museum, he noted, had organized seminars and other public events focused on the brutal history of Stalin's repressions. Attempts to memorialize the millions imprisoned under Stalin emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the Kremlin began dismantling them about a decade ago, after Mr. Putin returned to power.

A human rights organization, known as Memorial, which documented the crimes of the Stalin era, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. The Russian government closed it the year before. Many employees fled the country. Mr. Sokolov, the historian, was involved in the organization's "Last Address" project, which put the names of Stalin's victims on small metal plaques on the apartment houses where they last lived. In the four years since the Ukraine war started, many of the signs have been torn down, he said. Since Mr. Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has banned the annual ceremony commemorating the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repression, when people lined up all day outside the headquarters of the secret police in Moscow to read aloud the names of the victims of Soviet repression. The Gulag History Museum was founded in 2001, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, through the efforts of Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, whose father, a Bolshevik commander, was executed, and whose mother hanged herself in prison. Its first home was a cramped building incongruously located behind the Gucci store in downtown Moscow, with a reconstructed watchtower and coils of barbed wire visible down an alley next to the store.

The museum's permanent collection included an array of battered cell doors from different camps, and its special exhibitions featured unique memorabilia, like the clandestine diary of camp life drawn as cartoons. Its exposed brick walls, black metal fixtures and dim lighting were meant to evoke the camps. Museum researchers also carried out research expeditions around the country to gather oral history from those who had survived the camps, and the museum put a special emphasis on documenting the repression of ordinary people. The city government's statement on Friday about the new museum did not mention the Gulag History Museum, and the Ministry of Culture did not respond to a request for comment. But Russian news reports said the Gulag museum was being replaced. The new Museum of Memory will include exhibits like the recreated room of a Leningrad resident during the extended siege, the statement said. It quoted Natalya Kalashnikova, the new director, as saying, "One of its key goals is to instill in the modern generation a strong rejection of Nazism in all its manifestations." Mr. Putin has put a renewed emphasis on what Russia calls the Great Patriotic War, or World War II, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. An estimated 27 million Soviet citizens were killed in the war.

The Gulag History Museum in Moscow, the last prominent Russian institution dedicated to preserving the memory of Stalin’s labor camps, is being replaced by a new museum focused on Nazi war crimes and the “genocide of the Soviet people” archive.ph/xi8tl #totalitarianism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

The 1936 Berlin Olympics, which took place under the reign of Adolf Hitler, were used as a propaganda tool to promote the idea of Aryan supremacy and the Third Reich. Figures in Germany have called on the IOC to stop selling the T-shirts on its website. The committee has defended the sale, however, saying the T-shirt is part of its heritage collection. The IOC also faced criticism this week for disqualifying a Ukrainian athlete who wore a helmet commemorating his fellow athletes killed in Russia's war, under rules that restrict political statements during the games. Despite the criticism, the men's shirts have sold out in all sizes. By comparison, T-shirts depicting the games in Rome in 1960, Tokyo in 1964 and London in 1908 all remain in stock. The shirt, which costs £34 and is part of the IOC's "heritage" collection, features the original poster design for the games by artist Franz Wurbel. The poster featured classical imagery to link symbols of the Third Reich with ancient Greece. A golden male figure, his arm stretched to the upper right out of frame, wears a laurel wreath under the Olympic Rings and above the quadriga chariot drawn by four houses atop the capital's Brandenburg Gate.

T-shirts displaying the poster of the Olympic games hosted in Nazi Germany have sold out on the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) website…
IOC defends ‘heritage’ shirt celebrating games used by Hitler to promote the idea of Aryan supremacy. archive.ph/Nq6yC #nazism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

In a worldwide study of more than 10 million tweets and posts published between Oct. 7, 2023, and Oct. 7, 2024, the French researcher Hugo Micheron found that the number of shares and comments on the massacre swiftly reached a historic peak, higher than even the war in Ukraine, and remained abnormally high. All discussion groups across the globe were affected, even those having nothing to do with the Middle East, such as anti-vaxxers and climate skeptics. This is a new and unprecedented phenomenon, he told me. "With Oct.7, the very concept of war adds to its physical nature an informational component that touches everybody. We have entered the era of the First World War on information." What follows is an attempt to describe the effects of this information war launched by Hamas in Europe.

The Fall of Europe: From Paris to Birmingham to Brussels, antisemitism is the new normal—again www.tabletmag.com/sections/new... By @marcweitzmann.bsky.social #antisemitism #Islamism #Jihadism #authoritarianLeft #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

Tibet’s forgotten independence: China’s biggest historical lie www.eurasiareview.com/09022026-tib... #communism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

Interpreting antisemitism through the Holocaust alone also severs the phenomenon from its broader historical arc, excising both the long tradition of anti-Jewish movements that preceded the Holocaust and the ideological formations that emerged in its aftermath. This has obscured a central feature of anti-Jewish hatred: its capacity to mutate. Antisemitism's ability to shape-shift over time is clear when we look at successive historical forms: anti-Judaism, antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

The slogan "Never again," tied to the Holocaust, quietly admits that Jew-hatred doesn't die, it mutates. Yet the education built around that slogan has failed to prepare societies to recognize new mutations. Holocaust education froze antisemitism in the past, turning a living, adaptive hatred into a museum exhibit. As a result, while we chant "Never again," we fail to recognize the "again" when it reappears-even when it leads to people getting killed. Until Jewish institutions, schools and Holocaust educators update their curricula and language, meaningful progress in protecting Jewish students and families from antisemitism will remain limited. What's needed is a pragmatic and courageous paradigm shift, one that begins with naming and recognizing the contemporary libels used to demonize Jews. Phrases like "Zionism is racism" are simply the latest iteration of an ancient ritual of casting Jews as the enemy. The language appears modern and perhaps even harmless, but it isn't. It's simply the latest slogan to demonize Jews, not unlike "Christ killers" and "race polluters." People recognize antisemitism in its most obvious forms-swastikas and "Hitler was right" posts on social media-because they've been trained to do so. By contrast, anti-Zionism thrives precisely because it wears a moral mask. Until we learn to recognize its libels, we will continue to fight yesterday's hatred while losing to today's.

Holocaust education obscures antisemitism: It promotes the myth that Jews can be victims only if they’re powerless and depicted as subhuman. archive.ph/gZznD By Casey Babb and Naya Lekht #antisemitism #education #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

Ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day, the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany conducted a poll of over 1,000 Irish people, questioning them about their knowledge of the 20th century's most notorious genocide. One in 10 of those 18 to 29 believed the Holocaust was all a "myth", while a further 19% within the same age bracket thought it was "greatly exaggerated"

'Shocking' level of Holocaust denial in #Ireland 'rooted in antisemitism': One in 10 young Irish believe the Holocaust is a “myth”, while a further 19% think it was “greatly exaggerated ”. www.newstalk.com/news/holocau... #antisemitism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory #Shoah

Schools, struggling with parent and maybe even teacher groups who claim the Holocaust isn't real or "propaganda" or insist that any mention of genocide has to also mention Gaza, have chosen to go for the easy route and opt out altogether. It used to be said that people only love dead Jews - novelist Dara Horn has written a brilliant book on the subject - but now even the Holocaust victims are not immune from the modern incarnation of anti-Semitism. In truth, the Holocaust has become increasingly politicised for many years. HMD became watered down. First - and probably rightly - it included all the victims of the Nazis, including gay men, the Roma and Sinti gypsy groups, people with disabilities, and political enemies.

British schools have failed to properly teach children about the dangers of #antisemitism: It is sadly no surprise that Holocaust Memorial Day has been neutered and watered down www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/80a1ee7... By @nicolelampert.bsky.social #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

The irony, of course, is that all the attention paid to the Protocols-believed by tens of millions, to this very day, to be factual-obscures the increasingly apparent fact that there actually does exist a global conspiracy, albeit in precisely the opposite direction. Sometimes working together, sometimes working in parallel, sometimes centrally directed, sometimes dispersed, sometimes secretly, sometimes very much in the open, collectively there is an enormous body of individuals, organisations look, and governments who have all been working toward the same inglorious end for well over a century now. It's not that the dastardly Jews are conspiring to subjugate or eliminate the peoples of the world. It's that the peoples of the world (or at least enormously large constituents thereof) are actively conspiring to subjugate and (in all too many cases) to outright eliminate the Jews.

“The protocols of the elders of anti-Zion” is the 2.0 version of the conspiratorial antisemitic original. docemetproductions.com/protocols-of... By Andrew Pessin #HistoricalPoliticalMemory #antisemitism #conspiracism

This harrowing scene, captured in a 1941 photograph known as "The Last Jew in Vinnitsa," became an iconic image of the Holocaust for the way it captured the banal savagery of mass slaughter. But for decades, nobody could answer the most basic question the photograph posed: Who were these two men? That mystery was partly solved last month by Jürgen Matthäus, who recently retired from his post as the head of research at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. According to an article he wrote for the September issue of The Journal of Historical Studies, a German-language publication, the killer was Jakobus Onnen, 34, a former teacher from the town of Tichelwarf, near the German border with the Netherlands. After one of Mr. Onnen's living relatives provided Dr. Matthäus with family photos, an artificial intelligence tool made the match with 99.9 percent confidence. The photo emerged in 1961, during the Jerusalem trial of high-ranking Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann. It had been in the possession of Al Moss, a Holocaust survivor who said he had acquired it in 1945 but knew nothing of its context. Mr. Moss said he had made the photo public so the world would "know what went on in Eichmann's time." With unimpeachable clarity that remains intact decades later, the photo places the viewer in a gruesome setting that refuses rationalization.

At last, a name for the murderous face in a Holocaust photo: With the help of A.I., a historian has identified the killer in a 1941 image that defined the savagery of the Nazi regime. archive.ph/GtRxT #Shoah #Nazism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

Children of Ugandan Indians are having a bit of a moment. Electropop boasts Charlie XCX; statecraft, the Patels: Priti the shadow foreign secretary, Kash the FBI boss. And while the ones who go into politics have tended to be conservative, we now have a counterexample in Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who clinched the New York mayoralty at the beginning of this month. The anomaly is best explained by the politics of his father, Mahmood Mamdani. The apple, it seems, did not roll especially far down the postcolonial hillside. Mahmood, professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University, has long styled himself as the left's answer to VS Naipaul. Where the Nobel-winning curmudgeon surveyed postcolonial Africa with disdain, revelling in the wreckage of independence, Mamdani presents a more forgiving view: pathos instead of pity, paradox instead of despair. If independence didn't live up to the promise, he argues, it was because the colonised had been dealt a losing hand.

A scholarship to Pittsburgh was meant to lead to a career as an engineer, but he was waylaid by political science and a Harvard doctorate followed. When he returned home in 1972 to set himself up as a Ugandan academic, the country's new dictator, Idi Amin, had other plans: all 80,000 south Asians were to be gone within 90 days. Amin, who as a child had been nursed by an Indian woman, came to despise the community as an empire within. Indians were the visible face of colonialism, running plantations and corner shops while the British themselves remained discreetly out of sight. It's not surprising the expulsion was popular. There is, then, a touch of Stockholm syndrome in Mamdani's attempt here to rehabilitate Amin. He tells us that the expulsions were aimed at the Britisn, not Indians: "he did everything in his power to spare Asian lives". That was little comfort, of course, to those expelled. One suspects that many Ugandan Indians, Priti Patel among them, turned permanently hostile to state power and identity politics as a result. At the outset, Mamdani urges us to discard "media-driven preconceptions" - the lurid dispatches of Observer correspondents and the gothic tales of Amin's supposed cannibalism - and instead see Amin as an anti-colonial moderniser. Amin, in this telling, destroyed landlord power, made black rule "meaningful" and even "outwitted Israel and Britain" - feats that earn him a place in Mamdani's pantheon of liberation heroes. The corrective is bracing, but Mamdani over-eggs it. Amin was incontrovertibly a military despot under whose rule hundreds of thousands perished. His expulsion of Indians left Uganda short of milk, meat and medics; irony supplied the remedy when expatriates from India were imported to fill the gaps. True, Amin broke with Britain and Israel, who had manoeuvred him into power, though only to ally with Gaddafi and turn the region into a graveyard through military adventurism.

There is, in Slow Poison, a neat inversion of heroes. Mamdani's second target is the "preconception" that Yoweri Museveni rescued Uganda from Amin's wreckage. Where Amin, he claims, united Ugandans, Museveni revived tribal politics, carving the country into ever smaller ethnic fiefdoms. Amin was the patriot who spurned western tutelage; Museveni, the technocrat who kowtowed to neoliberalism and the IMF. But is Mamdani tilting at windmills here? Museveni's mixed-economy pragmatism may have multiplied Uganda's output tenfold, but western commentators haven't exactly turned a blind eye to his anti-gay death warrants, constitutional chicanery, vote-rigging and dynastic succession by stealth. Slow Poison has its longueurs and meandering paraphrases. Whether you endure or enjoy it will depend largely on your politics. Mamdani hails Amin's absurd antics - styling himself the King of Scotland; staging a mock fundraiser to save a bankrupt Britain; being borne aloft by white men in a sedan chair - as radical performance art. Perhaps. To me, it is simply tragic that, given the chance to build a nation, Amin chose instead to troll it.

Slow Poison by Mahmood Mamdani review – can you really rehabilitate Idi Amin?
The anthropologist and father of New York’s mayor-elect offers a revisionist view of modern Ugandan history www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n... By Pratinav Anil #HistoricalPoliticalMemory #BookReview #Uganda

A few days ago, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem posted a tweet in English with the following words: "Poland was the first country where Jews were forced to wear an identification sign to isolate them from the rest of the population. On this day, the 23rd In November 1939, Hans Frank, the Governor of the Generalgouvernement, issued an ordinance, according to which all Jews from the age of ten had to wear a ten centimeters wide white bracelet with a blue Star of David on their right arm. I would say: This statement is 100 percent correct. And she's matter-of-fact. In any case, it is nothing to be worried about. But in Poland, the reaction to the Yad Vashem post was angry and irrational. Both the Prime Minister and the President of the Parliament expressed disrept and indignation. The Foreign Ministry summoned the Israeli ambassador to a stand. And the Auschwitz Museum posted a post on social media full of absurd insinuations about Yad Vashem. It said: "We have learned that Yad Vashem plans to open a branch in Germany soon. We sincerely hope that this false and historically distorting message has nothing to do with it."

According to Polish politicians and probably also the vast majority of the Polish public, influenced by decades of lies and half-truths about the Holocaust, Yad Vashem should have added the adjective "occupied" before the word "Poland". Because God forbid that people end up thinking that we Poland had something to do with these terrible events.. All this nonsense is based on the assumption that between 1939 and 1945 the Poles and Polish society were deprived of any capacity for action. If something bad happened to the Jews - and indeed, terrible things happened - then it was not us who were responsible for it, but only the Germans. The Holocaust was a German and a Jewish affair. We Poland had nothing to do with him. That's the narrative. Hence the reflexive reactions of the Polish officials. Hence the demand that every time "Auschwitz" is officially mentioned, "German Nazi camp" must be added. Hence the official prohibition in 2017 to commemorate the bloody liquidation of the Jewish ghettos in Rzeszow (Reichshof) in July 1942. Hence also the use of the Internet domains ».eu« and ».org« for the websites of the death camp memorials, where all other museums in Poland use the ending ».pl«. The list could be continued. No, this has nothing to do with Poland, nothing to do with us, is the message. You always have to add that it was the Germans who committed the crimes. Can anyone imagine that President Emmanuel Macron would have objections to the expression "deportation of Jews from France"? Or that the Dutch Prime Minister is driving out of his skin when there is talk of the "introduction of anti-Semitic laws in Holland" in the Second World War? I can't imagine it. The latest scandal in Poland is another symptom of an acute outbreak of something I would call "the Polish disease". It is the inability of the nation to honestly deal with its own past.

The Polish disease: The dispute over a tweet from the Israeli Shoah memorial Yad Vashem shows that Poland is still unable to honestly deal with its own past www.juedische-allgemeine.de/meinung/die-... By Jan Grabowski #nationalism #antisemitism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory #Poland (phone translation)

Since October 7, anti-Israel propaganda has been relentless. Wave after wave of manufactured images, fake news, and doctored statistics have swept through social and legacy media alike. The impact has been felt on multiple levels: it harms Israel directly and demoralizes diaspora Jews, many of whom feel compelled to join the chorus of Israel's accusers to remain welcome in their societies. Why Israel has seemingly ceded the narrative battlefield is unclear. But a more pressing question is why so many were shocked by the ferocity of the anti-Israel information assault. This shock is puzzling, given how long the propaganda playbook has been in use. Anti-Israel disinformation is an enduring enterprise rooted in portraying Zionism as evil - an idea that springs from the much older conspiracy myth of Jewish power. Tropes equating Zionism with fascism and Nazism, or accusing Israel of genocide, have been recycled from conflict to conflict. Names and dates change, but the framework remains. Yet each time, we react as if we've never seen it before, watching helplessly as one onslaught follows another: "starvation," "scholasticide," "ethnic cleansing." Recognizing this dynamic is critical. Only by analyzing these patterns can Israel and the diaspora learn to anticipate them and get ahead next time.

Want to fight today’s anti-Israel propaganda? Remember yesterday’s.
Every time Israel is at war, Jews wake up blindsided, scrambling to improvise counterstrategies on the go – but we’ve seen it all before blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-fight-tod... By Izabella Tabarovsky #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

He oversaw the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people. He siphoned off billions of dollars of wealth from state coffers. And while widespread economic discontent led to the end of his strongman rule in Indonesia, he never faced criminal prosecution. But on Monday, less than three decades after he was forced to step down, the late dictator Suharto was anointed as a national hero by the current, democratically elected leader, Prabowo Subianto, his former son-in-law. The elevation of Suharto, who died in 2008, came with a dizzying split screen. Mr. Prabowo also bestowed the honor on Abdurrahman Wahid, a longtime Suharto critic who became Indonesia's first democratically elected president, and Marsinah, a young labor activist who became a face for human rights after she was kidnapped, tortured and killed during Suharto's rule. The accolade for Suharto, to many, was a jaw dropping swerve of revisionist history in Indonesia.

He was known for kleptocratic rule and bloodshed. Now he’s a national hero: Indonesia’s president bestowed the honor on the dictator Suharto, who died in 2008, in what many said was a stunning move of revisionist history www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/w... #HistoricalPoliticalMemory #Indonesia

There's a particular story of Jewish fear in the modern era that has stuck with me ever since I read about it. After the post-October 7 revelations of the mistreatment of Jewish patients in British hospitals, this account of an Israeli mother-to-be's anxiety over giving birth in London cannot be dismissed. Neither can it be resolved-there is no way to ensure that what has happened won't continue happening, and for this expectant mother that means putting her child's life in the hands of people she cannot trust. In some ways, Jewish medical fears are mundane, as she writes: "I worry if I should disclose my ethnicity when I arrive at hospital, and will I be free to speak in Hebrew? I feel comfortable talking English, but in situations where I'm not in control and am in pain, my default is my mother tongue... No woman should have to go through the labor with these thoughts in her head." And in other ways, those fears are impossible to fully disentangle from the 20th century's horrors, which included unspeakably grotesque medical persecution. But either way, those fears aren't new. Even the more mundane questions of basic care and treatment in a hospital have been around, in the West, for a century. Right here in America, in fact.

What happened to Jewish patients at a Brooklyn hospital in 1927? www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... By @sethamandel.bsky.social #antisemitism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

History in China can sometimes be a case of amnesia rather than remembrance. As with most public discourse related to Mao in contemporary China, at red tourism sites in Zunyi there is no visible attempt to confront the horrors of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, nor acknowledge the tens of millions of people estimated to have died as a result.

China’s ‘red tourism’ boom: Sites of historical importance to the ruling Communist party are attracting patriots both young and old archive.ph/clRQ4 By Edward White #communism #tourism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

Mr. Xi has embraced the Qing official's example with particular vigor, presiding during his 17 years in Fujian over the renovation of sites connected to Lin, including the house where he was born and his family's memorial hall. The hall is now a sprawling exhibition complex highlighting Western perfidy, Lin's righteous defiance and what a carved stone in a leafy courtyard describes as "China's incessant struggle against foreign aggression." In keeping with Mr. Xi's view that China needs to be open to the West but on its own terms, the exhibits also praise Lin for promoting Western science and technology as a way to strengthen China. Lin's birthplace in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian, has become the Bethlehem of modern Chinese nationalism, the small room in which he is said to have been born the centerpiece of a state-sponsored heritage trail feting his unyielding patriotic spirit, "I am so proud of my ancestor," said Lin Yanyi, a seventh-generation descendant who works for the Lin Zexu Foundation, which manages the birthplace. She said he had never spurned "good things from the West" but always put China's interests first.

How the 19th-century Opium War shapes Xi’s trade clash with Trump: China’s leader draws on lessons from Lin Zexu, a Qing official whose defiance of Britain led to China’s humiliating defeat but made him a national hero. archive.ph/QHuQP #communism #nationalism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

Anti-Israel disinformation is an enduring enterprise rooted in portraying Zionism as evil - an idea that springs from the much older conspiracy myth of Jewish power. Tropes equating Zionism with fascism and Nazism, or accusing Israel of genocide, have been recycled from conflict to conflict. Names and dates change, but the framework remains. Yet each time, we react as if we've never seen it before, watching helplessly as one onslaught follows another: "starvation," "scholasticide," "ethnic cleansing." Recognizing this dynamic is critical. Only by analyzing these patterns can Israel and the diaspora learn to anticipate them and get ahead next time.

Want to fight today’s anti-Israel propaganda?
Remember yesterday’s
Every time Israel is at war, Jews wake up blindsided, scrambling to improvise counterstrategies on the go – but we’ve seen it all before blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-fight-tod... By Isabela Tabarovsky #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

In any humane peacetime world, Rosalia Zemlyachka would be infamous for her sadism, her methods and the sheer scale of her butchery. If she had been a Nazi, maybe, her name might live on still, at least in the annals of international infamy. But, as Stalin himself remarked, the victors don't stand trial. Moreover, in most people's minds, there are still certain kinds of crime that women don't commit. Newspapers love a poisoner, a jilted lover or the brokenhearted story of a mother who kills, but female revolutionaries aren't meant to handle power, let alone to use it with any murderous effect. And they have to be beautiful; no glasses and no scars. Zemlyachka's face said far too much about the life she led.

Blood Red Rosalia: In a humane world, Rosalia Zemlyachka, the first woman ever awarded the Order of the Red Banner, would be infamous for her sadism, her methods & the sheer scale of her butchery engelsbergideas.com/portraits/bl... By Catherine Merridale #communism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler A growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the lessons of World War II.

The MAGA influencers rehabilitating Hitler: A growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the lessons of World War II. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv... By @yair-rosenberg.bsky.social #FarRight #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

The information board refers to the Nuremberg race laws passed by the Nazi regime in Germany in 1935, which included a definition of who was Jewish. The laws said anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was a Jew and anyone with one or two Jewish grandparents was Mischlinge, or mixed race. The IWM's information board states: "Under the provision of the law, a person was defined as Jewish based on how many observant Jewish grandparents they had, even if they were not personally Jewish themselves." The inclusion of the word "observant" raised concerns for a retired academic from New York who was visiting the Holocaust Galleries in London last year. She wrote to the IWM saying the "wording referring to observant Jewish grandparents with its lack of historical accuracy must be changed". The former academic, who asked not to be named, said she had been "extraordinarily impressed" with the material displayed at the galleries. "Then I came to the race laws, and I know that 'observant' Jewish grandparents just made no sense. It disregards the vast majority of the Jewish population who are not observant," she told the Guardian. The Nazis were intent on eradicating all Jews, regardless of whether they were observant or not, she said. "This is such a misleading impression of the Nazi outlook that for me it's reprehensible that it stays in the public domain."

Caro Howell, the IWM's director general, told the former academic that "full and sincere consideration" had been given to the points she had raised "but we stand by the curatorial choices that we have made and that our expert advisers have reviewed". In an email seen by the Guardian, Howell said the integrity of the IWM would be undermined if it made changes every time "questions of interpretative nuance" were raised. The retired academic sought the views of two highly regarded Holocaust historians. Christopher Browning, who has written numerous books on the Holocaust and was an expert witness in the David Irving libel trial in 2000, said: "The issue was not whether the grandparent was observant but whether his or her birth had been registered with the Jewish community. The grandparent could later even have converted to Christianity but if the grandparent had been registered as Jewish at birth, that for the Nazis was the deciding factor." Timothy Snyder, who has also written extensively about the Nazis, said: "It did not matter whether the grandparents were observant... No one was saved from persecution, as the wording incorrectly implies, by having grandparents who were not observant." He added: "As worded, the suggestion is that 'bad Jews', ie those with a secular (or even Reform) background, might have been spared from the persecutions that preceded the Holocaust, whereas 'good Jews', those with religious (or Orthodox) backgrounds, were the victims. This is nonsense."

Imperial War Museum rejects criticism of caption in Holocaust display: Visitor to museum and two eminent historians say wording of information board on Nuremberg race laws is incorrect
www.theguardian.com/culture/2025... #HistoricalPoliticalMemory #nazism #antisemitism #Shoah

On Holocaust Envy If you’re going to plausibly accuse Israel of committing a war crime, you’ll have to get creative: The IDF’s unprecedented minimization of civilian casualties is a major obstacle to anti-Zionist

On Holocaust envy www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #Shoah #antisemitism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

Adolf Hitler saw the vast expanses of Eastern Europe as essential for Germany's Lebensraum. They happened to be inhabited by tens of millions of Slavs - largely Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians - whose identity or very existence would have to be annihilated to pave the way for German colonisation. Anti-Slavism was not, however, a pillar of Nazi ideology as antisemitism was. The attitude of Nazi ideologues towards Slavs might be best summed up as genocidal indifference. Tens of millions had to die not necessarily because they were Slavs, but because they were in the way. Those that weren't - Slovaks, Croats, Bulgarians - could be and did become allies or puppets. Insofar as Nazis had a Slav policy, it was to splinter Slavic peoples into as many small groups as possible (turning them into 'racial material' in Nazi lingo), Germanising some, working others to death, and dispensing entirely with those deemed racially worthless.

On 10 August 1941, Moscow witnessed the opening of the first All-Slavic Congress, gathering Slavic exiles from across Europe. It was made explicit that this new Slavic movement was entirely different from the Muscovite Pan-Slavism of the past. In the opening address Alexei Tolstoy called on the attendees to reject as reactionary 'the old ideology of Pan-Slavism. Slavs, as he expanded in an article published in Pravda the following year, were 'hard-working, lovers of liberty and peace and culture' who had spent all of history fighting against the despotism of an arrogant west and nomadic conquering east. Now they should unite, so that every Slavic nation 'may be entitled, as other nations are, to a free, peaceful existence - that the culture of our nations may flourish without restraint. The product of the congress was a new All-Slavic Committee. Its purpose was to propagandise the war as a joint struggle of Slavic nations against Hitler's genocidal plans, reaching not just Slavs in the Soviet Union, but even those in Latin America and Anglophone countries (London and Detroit would also host Slavic Congresses during the war). As Stalin warned on 7 November 1941 - the anniversary of the October Revolution - the fanatical German dictator was seeking to 'exterminate the Slav peoples' and annihilate 'the great Russian nation.

Unspoken here was Stalin's complicity in the first stages of this genocidal agenda. The Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland was unspeakably brutal, aimed at turning Poles from a state-forming nation into a helot class. The Soviets did not step in to save their 'Slavic brother' but took their own slice of Poland in which they pursued their own murderous policy targeting the Polish elites. It was an early indication that the new Slavic politics was not as far removed from the old Tsarist Pan-Slavism as many of its proponents insisted. But at a time when Stalin had seemingly convinced the entire world of his earnestness, when the Red Army was the only fighting force that could bring down Hitler's war machine, it was easy to fall prey to wishful thinking. There was no more poignant example than Benes. The 'new Slavic politics' was precisely what he and many generations of liberally minded Czechs had dreamed of. A Slavic world driven by the democratic spirit of the West but standing on its own two feet. In a series of articles for the All-Slavic Committee's house paper in 1943, Benes outlined his own practical, democratic vision, later expanded into a book that examined the whole history of the Slavic idea and its hopeful future. In December 1943 he travelled to Moscow seeking confirmation from Stalin himself that their visions of the new Slavic politics were as aligned as they seemed to be from Soviet Pan-Slavic propaganda. Over the course of his winding journey through Iraq and the Caucasus, he spent many days in lively conversation with the Soviet Deputy Foreign Commissar Alexander Korneichuk..

The Slavic War according to Stalin: For Czechs, Poles, and Russians, the Second World War was a war for Slavic survival — one that Stalin would hijack to forge an empire of his own engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-s... By @ljukic.bsky.social‬ #PanSlavism #Stalinism #Nazism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

The bravery of Soviet Jews should be remembered this VE Day - The Jewish Chronicle Jewish troops in the Red Army fought to the end rather than face the horror of capture

The bravery of Soviet Jews should be remembered this VE Day: Jewish troops in the Red Army fought to the end rather than face the horror of capture www.thejc.com/news/the-bra... #VEDay80 #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

So what are the silver linings? Well, this may come off as cold comfort, but the most important lesson from all this is that the entire world knows that Jews are indigenous to the land and that this history is well-established fact. That includes Palestinians and their advocates— no one in the world argues in good faith for the "colonialist" interpretation of Zionism. This is the anti-Semitism version of flat-earth theory. It exists outside the very idea of knowledge. That is what is so threatening to the academic world: Their defensiveness is a tacit acknowledgement that the Palestinian-fueled anti-Zionist narrative of the land is universally regarded as a made-up story. If there's a second silver lining, it's in the form of a lesson learned the hard way. Israel is the only trustworthy steward of the region's history. Those dark ages the academic world is working so hard to bring about? The state of Israel is what stands in their way, and it isn't going anywhere.

The destruction of history for a Lie that no one believes: When it comes to Jewish historical sites in the holy land, even your most “moderate” academic seems to turn into ISIS—a destructive force seeking a new and permanent dark age. www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

Gaming Japan's bloody past Controversies over the latest instalment in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, set during Japan’s bloody Sengoku jidai, or ‘era of warring states’ (c.1467-1600), show why the past should not be sanitised...

#Gaming Japan’s bloody past: Controversies over the latest instalment in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, set during Japan’s bloody Sengoku jidai, or ‘era of warring states’ (c.1467-1600),show why the past should not be sanitised. By @drchrisharding.bsky.social #nationalism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

Daniel Szeftel traces the evolution of the settler colonial charge against Zionism through the thinking of Constantin Zureiq and Fayez Sayegh – both academics and diplomats – during the early years of Pan-Arabism. Complicit in collaboration with Nazism, these Arab nationalists reworked their discourse after the war in order to delegitimise Israel in the eyes of international opinion. Although still antisemitic and supremacist, their ideology then underwent a reversal under the banner of settler colonialism: Arab nationalists concealed their own eliminationist intentions and projected them onto Israel

From Johns Hopkins to Beirut, and from Beirut to Columbia: a history of the ‘settler colonialism’ charge fathomjournal.org/from-johns-h... By Daniel Szeftel #HistoricalPoliticalMemory #SettlerColonialism #antisemitism #PanArabism #Islamism #nationalism

Between 1885 and 1908, when he was forced to sell it to the Belgian state, the territory was owned by Leopold II. He had secured it for himself at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where Europe’s powers divided the ‘magnificent African cake’ between themselves. None of his peers thought that Congo, perceived by contemporaries as a sprawling land mass at the heart of the ‘dark continent’, was especially attractive, so Leopold succeeded in quickly taking it off the negotiating table. It went on to be witness to the deaths of millions – as well as rape, famine, disease and widespread exploitation – as the monarch imposed forced labour in a tyrannical push to capitalise on his private possession’s abundant supply of natural resources, notably rubber and ivory.

An empire of ivory and inhumanity: A vivid account tells the story of Belgian colonialism in Africa, exposing a history of hubris and greed that still casts a long shadow. engelsbergideas.com/reviews/an-e... #BookReview #colonialism #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

How, therefore, can we make the best use of history in facing contemporary problems? First, we must avoid thinking ‘this is just like…’ or even ‘this is just what we said would happen’. Second, using history to help us understand the mindset of potential or actual adversaries, and even of our allies, is more important than ever. That includes acknowledging, even if rejecting, their interpretation of that history. There will always be those who distort the historical record for their own purposes or practise selective memory. But history, in the sense of what ‘actually happened’, is always there. It can be of great help, particularly in illuminating the all-important context to past and present events. But please – despite what I’ve written above – let’s leave Munich out of it.

The pitfalls of hindsight: History provides an illuminating insight into past and present events, but employing false analogies divorced from historical context can have disastrous consequences. engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the... By Gill Bennett #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

Nothing is worse than an inconclusive peace The similarities and dissimilarities between the policy of appeasement as practised in the 1930s and that of the 2020s are a warning from history.

Nothing is worse than an inconclusive peace: The similarities and dissimilarities between the policy of appeasement as practised in the 1930s and that of the 2020s are a warning from history. engelsbergideas.com/notebook/not... By Tim Bouverie #RussiaUkraineWar #HistoricalPoliticalMemory